National berth at stake for Wolves in Rugby 7s qualifier

The Western Oregon Rugby 7s team hosts a national qualifier on Saturday. The Wolves first two matches are against Oregon Tech at 10:20 a.m., and against Puget Sound at 11:20 a.m. The championship match is at 4 p.m. Win it and the Wolves qualify for the national tournament. Submitted photo by Sam Sanders.

Ben Barlow’s love for rugby goes beyond what happens on the field; it’s also about what happens off it.

“I grew up playing American football, soccer, basketball, baseball. All that stuff,” said Barlow, who coaches Western Oregon’s 7s and 15s men's rugby teams. “My first year in high school I decided to give rugby a shot.”

That “shot” has now lasted 15 years.

“The culture behind rugby was very different then other American sports,” he said of his early fascination. “In a lot of the other sports the mentality is like, we’re going to go out there and kill the other team. At the end of the game, you leave and walk away.”

But rugby is different.

“Don’t get me wrong. We still want a competitive edge in rugby. But after every match there is a social,” Barlow said. “It’s a really cool experience to go shake hands with the team that you just spent 80 minutes trying to kill on the field, and actually get to know them.”

There’s also a little thing called R-E-S-P-E-C-T that extends to players and non-players alike.

“The level of respect that you find in rugby, not only with the other team but with the referees and things like that, is unparalleled in a lot of other sports,” he said. “Honestly, I quickly fell in love with this aspect of it. Once I started playing rugby, I didn’t play any other sport.”

Barlow, who played collegiately at Western Oregon, recently took his game south.

“I had the opportunity to sign a contract to go down and play in New Zealand,” Barlow said. “I learned a lot from that (experience).”

Barlow played at the premier level while in New Zealand, a country whose passion for the sport could very well exceed this country’s passion for football. Their national team, the All Blacks, is highly regarded internationally.

“Down there, my coach's son started playing rugby when he was 3. It's rippa rugby, which is kind of like pee-wee football, where they do non-contact. But it’s like you grow up playing rugby from that age,” Barlow said. “They get this ability to see the game a little bit better, and a little bit clearer, because they grow up playing it. So the speed of the game, the speed of the ball, the individual skill levels were just insane.”

Some of what Barlow learned has since been incorporated into the Western Oregon program.

“The structure (New Zealand) was able to put behind their system was more robust than what we had here in previous years,” Barlow said. “So coming back with (knowledge) of that structure was a huge part of what I think has helped us kind of move the program forward.”

Western Oregon has reached a point where its rugby teams often rank among the nation’s best in the small college division. They can add to their legacy come Saturday.

The 2024 Collegiate Rugby 7s Championship is Friday through Sunday, April 26-28, in Boyds, Maryland. To advance, Western Oregon must first win a national qualifier. They have two chances to do so: Saturday, on their home turf at Western Oregon, and Saturday, April 6, at Cal Maritime in Vallejo, California. 

“I think we stand a very, very good shot of qualifying at our home tournament,” said Andy Main, associate director for Western Oregon Campus Recreation.

Two at-large bids are awarded to the national championship, but they usually go to East Coast or Midwest teams.

“The likelihood that Western would be selected for an at-large bid is pretty small. Even though we’ve been a top 10 team nationally the last few years,” Main said.

Eight teams are expected at next week’s qualifier. Most of the teams hail from the Pacific Northwest. Cal Poly Humboldt and Cal Maritime are from outside the region and considered strong contenders.

Western Oregon competes in the small college division, and as a club sport. But that doesn’t mean the Wolves can’t hold their own against larger schools.

“We’ve beaten Oregon and Oregon State the last two years,” Main said. “The small college division is by far the most robust. There’s like three times as many small college teams as there are in any of the other three divisions.”

There’s also quality in that quantity.

“I think it would be a misunderstanding to state our division is the easiest division,” Main said. “On the contrary, we find that small college teams are quite frequently just as good, if not better than the teams” competing in higher divisions.

In rugby 7s, each team fields seven players. Halves are seven minutes. Intermission is two minutes.

“So you have 14 minutes of playing time, though the referee might stop time for injury, or if the ball is kicked really far away,” Main said. “A lot of people hear seven minutes, and they’re like ‘I can do seven minutes.’ First, it’s exhausting. You get 90 seconds in, you get two minutes in, and you’re like what have I done here?”

Come Saturday, new matches start every 20 minutes. One match is played at a time. Each team plays all the other teams in its division, with winners of the round robin advancing.

The tournament will also provide a crash course for those who want to know more about the sport.

“A lot of people in the United States don't know rugby. You just don’t grow up playing it here,” Main said. “If you're not familiar with rugby, then rugby 7s is a great way to get out and see it for the first time.”

Rugby 7s is faster paced and features more breakaways than rugby 15s. It’s also simpler.

“There's not as much of a technical aspect as there is in 15s that spectators need to know. There’s going to be penalties and stuff like that. If you haven’t played rugby, you’ll have no idea what the penalty is,” Main said. “In 7s, you cut down on that. So it’s more exciting. It's easier to understand.”

The home turf is about as long as a football field, but wider. It is located west of campus, near the softball and baseball fields.

The United States hosts the 2031 and 2033 Rugby World Cups, according to the Goff Rugby Report.

Rugby 7s is an Olympics sport.